New Lutheran Quote of the Day

What he calls baptism is baptism itself with God's Word.  That's what does it!  And if that is where the Lord is quite unmistakably doing His stuff, then you can't be taken captive by whether you've had a candle or not.  But a candle could be a helpful way of confessing what Baptism in fact does, enlighten, an old way of talking about Baptism.  You note in the earlier thing, what they added to embellish baptism, or better still, to extol it: the things that were done to confess what Baptism itself does.  So the exorcisms confess that in Holy Baptism we are taken out of the dominion of Satan and brought into being Christ's own child.  So when you have your confidence located in Baptism as such a means of grace, which just is so utterly gospel in the utter abundance, pouring out the gifts that come there, there's no measuring the gifts of baptism:  half a pint for this and half a pint for your venial sins and two gallons for your mortal sins.  It's the whole, a sort of Niagara, the lot.  That is the way the Lord forgives and loves to give out His gifts.  There it is!  He just can't stop adding one thing to another.  And that is how these things came into the order of Baptism. -- Dr. Norman Nagel, Logia VII:2, p. 25.